At the 2008 conference on ‘Design & Emotion‘ (Oct. 6-8 2008, Hongkong), one of the conference themes relates to similarities and differences between product experience design and design of food and fragrances. The theme caption reads “What emotional responses do we experience in response to foods and fragrances? Are these particular and distinct emotions, or are these the same emotions we also experience in response to product appearance? How can we describe and design for food and fragrance emotions? This theme invites papers that discuss the experiential impact of food and fragrance design.”
Interactive Cooking
A research assignment: “TV-programs about cooking are popular but could be more popular if the TV-audience could interact with the cooks about the recipe, suggest alternative ingredients, ask to show or tell more details, give background information or whatever. The main obstacle for Interactive TV seems to be that there is no adequate business model and that there is some historical separation between TV displays having only marginal processor power and PC technology. But technology doesn’t prevent Interactive TV.” – Might deliver some interesting results.
Food Pairing Networks
A collection of simple network graphs illustrating how the flavor components of 250 different food products relate to each other, as a tool to inspire the creation of original recipes. By comparing the flavor of each food product, such as strawberry, with the rest of the food and their flavors, new combinations such as ‘strawberry with peas’ can be made. The more flavors food products have in common, the shorter the distance between the food products.
Experience Food at Work Round Table
Or … how to ‘improve the workforce’ by changing food habits.
Meaning of Chopsticks in Asia
Designing for a global audience means making sure it fitts in all cultures. Almost impossible considering all differences among people. What and how people eat differs all over the place. From chopsticks to forks and knives and how it relates to culture and design. (source: uigarden)
User Experience from Product Creation Perspective
Virpi Roto (Sr. Research Scientist Mobile HCI at Nokia) stated in this paper 
that “(…) we can talk about user experience whenever there is interaction with a product. A cake does provide user experience, because I can interact with it: I touch the cake and feel how soft it is, and bitting that cake gives delicious taste as ‘feedback’. That’s how I interact with the cake.” – So, food and UX do have things in common.
Wine as InfoObject
Mike Kuniavsky (of Adaptive Path fame) published a post on wine from an informational perspective.